


Episode 16: Language Barrier

by PitoyaPTx



Series: Clan Meso'a [16]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Anxiety, Awkward first meeting, Awkward friends, Clan Meso'a, Exotic Food, Gen, Mandalorian, Mandalorian Culture, potential best friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-12-30 13:22:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18316094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PitoyaPTx/pseuds/PitoyaPTx
Summary: "I translated that saying..." ~TavutTaking a break from food to talk about language made all invloved want to take a break from language to talk about food.





	Episode 16: Language Barrier

“Suh cooey gahr, vohd.”  
Tavut shrugged, “Good enough,” he said, pulling the pad of paper back and scribbling another set of words down in both mando’a and their rough phonetic equivalent.   
“Try this one,” he pushed the pad back across the table.   
Cara frowned and studied to her what looked like more dashes at varying angles followed by a jumble of nonsensical letters. Aviila glanced over Cara’s shoulder and her eyes widened. She gave Tavut a disapproving look. He winked.   
“Dik...oot? Dikut? What’s dikut?” Cara asked, instantly growing sour the moment she saw Tavut’s puffed out cheeks. He broke, slapping the table and roaring with laughter. Cara shoved the pad into his chest and crossed her arms with a huff.   
“This isn’t helping, you know!”   
“I know I know,” he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye, “just wanted to lift the atmosphere.”   
She narrowed her eyes.  
“I think,” Aviila quickly interjected, pulling a steaming pot off the burner and walking it to the table, “that’s enough of that.”   
Tavut cleared away the scraps of paper and laid down a thick disc made out of woven fiber in the center of the table. Together with Cara, he lifted and secured the table leafs to make room for the pot, a tray of steamed vegetables, and the largest smoked fish Cara had ever seen.   
“It’s a Dunuul,” Avilla told her, hoisting the child-sized fish into a sack and slinging it over her shoulder, “We’ll be having company tonight, and he has a big appetite.”   
“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Cara said, spying an even larger Dunuul being carted off by two ecstatic teenagers.   
“Mm yes, I doubt you would see one outside of Meso’kaan,” she agreed, waving to a group of children bounding past them down to the plaza, “The seaside tribe, the Drowned Suns, used to worship the Dunuul.”   
“What for?”  
“Dunuul,” she explained, “have medicinal properties. When we get home, I’ll show you their poisonous spines. The toxins in them, when diluted and combined with other ingredients, can be used to clean wounds, dissolve skin blemishes, and as digestives when pressed into tablets,” she grinned, “You might have to camp out in the refresher, but they are effective.”   
“Did your tribe worship an animal, too?”  
“Mhm,” Aviila pointed to a pack of tusked canines wrestling over a brown rubber ball, “We worshipped the Chochoma for their hunting skills. We believed seeing one on a hunt was good luck and meant that your hunt would be successful.”   
Cara nodded. She could see that, under the cute and cuddly exterior, there could be a ferocious hunter. Either that or Aviila’s ancestors were very superstitious. She kept that comment to herself.   
“So,” Cara broke the nearly ten minute long silence as they lugged produce and the giant fish up the first set of hills, “Who’s coming over? Batuk?”  
Aviila chuckled at her pronunciation, “Ba’atuk, but no. Tavut is coming to see us. You remember him from the listening post?”  
“He met us with Kocih...Kouchi-”  
“Koucitesh, and yes. He stood to her right.”   
“I remember, yeah, although,” she added, a little embarrassed, “I was real tired at that point.”   
“Don’t worry,” Aviila put her free arm around her, “He didn’t say anything other than ‘welcome’ so think of it like meeting him for the first time.”   
Cara hummed in acknowledgement.   
“Plus,” Aviila added with a cheeky grin, “He’s never met an outsider.” 

Tavut, a tall Mirialan with short cropped hair and deep green eyes, arrived not long after the women began prepping the kitchen. Leagues stronger than Cara, he carried the table out into the enclosed patio attached to the house. He was quiet at first, rarely addressing Cara directly until Aviila shooed him away.   
“Ra’na,” she laughed, shoving him outside where Cara sat peeling tubers at the table, “Talk to her.”   
“Ra’na?” he protested, holding the door open so she couldn’t slide it shut, “About what?”  
“Anything,” Aviila rolled her eyes, “Make her feel at home. Teach her some words, maybe? Get to know her.”   
“Ori’vod,” he groaned as she closed and locked the door.   
“Make sure to set up the burners,” she called through the glass, “I’ll let it cook out there so it doesn’t steam up in here.”   
She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Tavut with his hands on his hips. He shook his head and looked up at Cara’s reflection in the door, startled to find her staring back at him.   
“Everything alright?” she asked.   
He turned and smiled politely, then scratched the back of his head with a look of mild confusion on his face. He opened his mouth, then shut it, thinking for a moment.   
“Hello, Cahrah,” he said slowly in heavily accented Basic.   
“Hello, Tavut,” she smiled back.   
He blinked. Was that the extent of his Basic?  
“I.. don’t speak like this often,” he flushed, “but it is good practice.”  
She nodded, quickly turning back to the task in front of her.   
Did I do something wrong? He stood there, idly fidgeting with the beads on his belt.   
“I’m..the first outsider you’ve met?” Cara offered, not keen on more awkward silence.   
Tavut perked up, “Yes! I..uh..well, that is,” he stammered, “I just...my grasp of Basic isn’t very well.”  
She looked up at him, her bright green eyes twinkling with amusement. It was a little forced on her part. Tavut looked like he could snap a tree in half.   
“I can teach you mando’a!” He quickly added, “Aviila wanted me to.”  
Cara raised an eyebrow, “That’s what she said when she shoved you out the door?”  
He nodded. To his relief, she smiled.   
“I do need to learn your language, and have plenty of veggies to cut,” she pushed the box of peels off the chair beside her and patted it. 

It didn’t take long to realize teaching wasn’t Tavut’s forte. He began with the alphabet, or rather, which letters Basic uses versus what mando’a excludes. Then he tried pronunciation, which made sense until he showed her a bunch of words with similar spelling that had ever so slight variations in pronunciation. With his Basic lacking in as many ways as Cara’s mando’a, it was a trainwreck of a lesson. Eventually Aviila had to intervene before Cara threw a roll of foil at him. The lesson, then, was ended and dinner was served.   
“Haili cetare!” Aviila gestured to the spread, passing plates around the table, “Dig in!”   
Cara reached for a Dunuul bundle, a malle’nuul as Aviila called it, since it was the least recognizable dish on the table. Ever since she watched the cooks forming the milled grain disks and baking them in the outdoor ovens, Cara knew she had to try anything wrapped up in them. She picked up a bundle and her fingers met the slightly rough and firm exterior dampened by the steam from its leafy casing. The filling, she’d observed, was cooked chunks of meat from the Dunuul’s flank mixed together with a tangy paste, freshly squeezed citrus, and a few whole spice leaves pre-steamed so they’d melt into the mixture during the final baking. Cara took a small bite to to ease into it before scarfing down the whole thing. She sat back against her chair and gave Aviila an enthusiastic thumbs up. How could everything she ate up until this point be blown so far out of the water by something so simple? They had wrapped foods on Tatooine, but nothing like this! She tried the soup next, finding it was more like a thick stew than what she’d been expecting. Chunks of Dunuul flank, vegetables, doughy dumplings, and a chopped fungus swam in a savory assortment of red sauce, sauteed spice leaves, and a vegetable stock that gave the dish a kind of depth Cara expected from those fancy cantinas her brother wrote about.   
By this point, Cara realized that this must be what real, homemade food tasted like. Growing up, they ate whatever they could buy at trading outposts or leftover crates of pre-packaged food the Black Sun sometimes left them if they were cooperative. In other words, if the Sun remembered her family existed and felt like it, they got food. Once, her father tried to cook womp rat, but it didn’t go so well. Dovin must be living the life if this is what real food is like, Cara’s bittersweet thoughts barged in. She pictured him and Vana, and maybe the kids they probably had by now, drinking from fancy cups and chatting it up with bankers or tech moguls. She wasn’t sure what kinds of people the wealthy were other than that they were wealthy enough to not get kidnapped by… When Aviila and Tavut were otherwise occupied with food, Cara shook her head to clear her thoughts. She wasn’t kidnapped. Aviila was only protecting her… but from what? Would Beon and Fent have taken her back to Clan Ordo? Would she have been at dinner with them eating foods like this had they taken charge of her? Would they be teaching her mando’a? Would they be worried about her if she didn’t contact them… Did she have to contact them? Out of all her questions that one seemed the most absurd. Of course they’d be worried and somehow she had to contact them. I mean, she idly stirred her bowl of stew, they did care about me right? Instead of wallowing in what-ifs Cara chose to politely engage with Tavut… but he was otherwise occupied.   
Aviila wasn’t kidding about Tavut’s appetite. When she set the entire fish-head in front of him, Cara expected him to carve it up into chunks and set it back on the baking tray. Instead, he took it by the spine and ate it like her brother did a drumstick. He ate voraciously, stopping only to pull the occasional bone out of his mouth and toss it into the box of peels still sitting beside him on the ground. Taken aback, Cara turned to Aviila who merely shrugged. Not only did he pick the skull clean, he ate four bowls of the stew, six malle’nuul, and chased it all down with several mugs of Ka’hast. If she wasn’t still frustrated from their language lesson, she might have found his eating habits comical. However, she sat silently across the table from him and tried not to look as scandalized as she felt. Aviila seemed to be the only one truly enjoying their company, now resting her head on her hand and beaming at them both as if they were her children. I’ll work on them, she laced her fingers together under her chin and sighed.   
“Have a well night!” Tavut called over his shoulder as he left, arms full of leftover food.   
“I’ll be right back,” said Aviila, walking behind him with another tin of leftovers, “Go ahead and shut off the downstairs lights for the night.”   
Cara nodded and waved politely, but was glad to finally have some alone time. Once the pair disappeared down the hill she flipped on the outside light and shut the door behind her. In the stillness of the room she slumped to the floor, buried her head in her arms, and cried…


End file.
